As Jesus “grew and became strong,” being “filled with wisdom, and as “the favor of God was upon Him” (Luke 2:40), and as He began to live out the life of the Messiah within a community that generally believed that the Messiah would be the fleshly embodiment of their covenant making, creative, and providential God, He would undoubtedly have searched the collected Hebrew Scriptures for guidance in living according to messianic expectations. Naturally, Jesus was concerned with how to go about revealing God to His people. That said, we can quite rightly here contemplate the “suffering servant” of Isaiah. With our knowledge of the way in which Jesus lived and died, it is rather clear that He took the notion of the suffering servant as rather foundational in His mission.
Likewise, as the authors of the Gospels, living in the early days of the church that was growing and serving and enduring threats and persecutions in the wake of Jesus’ Resurrection and ascension and the telling of that story, and in a time in which oral traditions (possibly informed by smaller written collections of Jesus’ words or deeds) concerning Jesus were circulating, sought to tell Jesus’ story within the framework of messianic (God in the flesh) conceptions that were on offer within the Hebrew Scriptures. Just as Jesus, to whom we are able to look as God in the flesh, was concerned with properly revealing God to His people, so too would His biographers be concerned with structuring their stories of Jesus with an eye and an ear to the same thing. With this notion, we are not necessarily talking about making Jesus fit within a certain mold, or telling His story so as to make it appear that He is the fulfillment of centuries-old prophecies, but rather, utilizing certain portions of the Scriptures that served to inform the people about the nature of their God, and structuring the presentation of the stories of Jesus so as to align with nature-of-God-revealing statements that are part and parcel of the writings of Israel’s prophets, poets, and historians.
Surely, we well understand that the Gospels offer an exceedingly small glimpse into the life of our Lord, so we do well to consider why it is that what was selected for recounting to and for the church communities, was in fact selected. Most likely, we take the structure of the presentation of events in the life of Jesus for granted, enjoying the narrative on offer, without every wondering why certain events follow one another within the Gospel presentation. If we take seriously the fact that Jesus lived as part of a community that took its story very seriously, and understood itself according to the story recorded in its Scriptures, while also understanding themselves as the covenant people of the Creator God that routinely enters into history to act for or towards His people as they looked towards a great and seemingly final intervention, then we must bring this notion to our reading of the Gospels.
Take, for instance, a story that makes its way into all four Gospel portraits of Jesus, which is the feeding of the five thousand. All four Gospels present the feeding in much the same form. However, Luke, after the story of the feeding, diverges completely from the story-line on offer in Mark, Matthew, and John. John maintains the same story-line following the feeding, though it differs in a significant detail as it relates to our purposes here. Matthew adds the story of Peter’s walking on water. In each case, we acknowledge that the author uses the story of the feeding, along with what follows, within the goals that they have set for their overall presentation of Jesus. As Mark’s narrative is generally considered to be the oldest, being foundational for both Matthew and Luke, we will look at what is to be found there.
Operating within a full realization that there is a purpose related to the structuring of the narrative, we see in the sixth chapter of Mark that Jesus feeds a multitude through the multiplication of bread and fish, doing so by the Sea of Galilee. Then, drawing the feeding together with what comes after, and doing so for the purpose of His narrative, Mark goes on to report that “Immediately Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while He dispersed the crowd” (6:45). Having retired to the mountain to pray, from His vantage point He could observe His disciples on the water. “He saw them straining at the oars, because the wind was against them” (6:48a). Mark then reports that Jesus came to His disciples, “walking on the sea” (6:48c), which caused great fear amongst those men. Ultimately, “He went up with them into the boat, and the wind ceased” (6:51a). As was said, Matthew reports nearly the same story, adding Peter’s attempt to walk on the sea. Luke moves in a different direction, omitting the second part of the story, not because he did not believe it, but because it clearly did not fit with his overall movement. John’s is fundamentally the same, reporting a rough sea and a strong wind (6:18), though there is no report of the ceasing of the wind once Jesus gets into the boat. Instead, John reports that “immediately the boat came to the land where they had been heading” (6:21b). Clearly, however, John’s report, like that of Matthew and Mark, is meant to demonstrate the power of God at work in Jesus.
So what’s the point? It is at this point that we return to the idea that the Scriptures were undoubtedly searched by both Jesus and those that would write the Gospel accounts, so as to make sense of the mission and of the reports of that mission. Such thoughts, together with the stories of the feeding of the multitude, the walking on water, and the calming of the wind, lead us to the Psalms. In the seventy eighth Psalm, keeping in mind the purposely structured Gospel narrative of feeding and then the control of nature and the desire to show forth Jesus as the manifestation of God in the flesh, while also acknowledging that this was a reflection on the exodus and wilderness experience of Israel, we find marked similarities as we read “He rained down manna for them to eat; He gave them the grain of heaven. Man ate the food of the mighty ones. He sent them more than enough to eat. He brought the east wind through the sky, and by His strength led forth the south wind” (78:24-26).
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